What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.